Review
“Savagely satirizing the culture and values of contemporary America, often with a psychedelic twist, R Crumb’s art directly addressed political disillusionment.” -- Elena Martinique - Widewalls
“Whatever one thinks of his subject matter, it’s difficult to deny R. Crumb’s prodigiousness with the pencil.” - Paris Review
“The color scheme of the R. Crumb exhibition that Robert Storr curated for David Zwirner deserves an award.” -- Jackson Arn - Art in America
“The cartoons of Robert Crumb, aka R. Crumb, have ignored the lines between comics and fine art, so-called good taste and bad, and countless other binaries.” -- Annie Armstrong - ArtNews
“Storr…a serious player in New York’s art world — has written an excellent introduction to the book, wrapping Crumb’s vulgar libertine excess with a prophylactic of prose.” - Mutual Art
About the Author
For over five decades, R. Crumb (b. 1943) has used the popular medium of the comic book to address the absurdity of social conventions, political disillusionment, irony, racial and gender stereotypes, sexual fantasies, and fetishes. Inspired by Thomas Nast, Honoré Daumier, T.S. Sullivant, and James Gillray, amongst others, his drawings offer a satirical critique of modern consumer culture, and often seem to possess an outsider’s perspective—a self-conscious stance that Crumb frequently relates to his personal life.
Robert Storr is an American artist, critic, and educator who was a curator, and then senior curator, of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture from 1990 to 2002 and from 2005 to 2007. He served as the first American-born director of the Venice Biennale. From 2002 to 2006, he was the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and then dean of the Yale School of Art from 2006 to 2016, where he remains as a professor of painting and printmaking. The exhibition he organized at David Zwirner in 2013 to celebrate the centenary of Ad Reinhardt was voted “Best Show in a Commercial Space in New York” by the US Art Critics Association.